Monthly Archives: June 2014

Over on the Redline blog, I’ve put up a short piece about Gerry Conlon with a film of him speaking to the Maritime Union of Australia conference in Melbourne in 2011. It’s headlined Gerry Conlon, 1954-2014: victim of British state terror, fighter for human rights.

The following speech was delivered by Liam O Ruairc at the ‘Nordirland: Einblicke in die linke republikanische Bewegung’ conference in Hamburg on May 30.

This year marks twenty years since the 31 August 1994 IRA ceasefire and sixteen years since the 10 April 1998 Belfast Agreement brought peace to Northern Ireland, if we are to believe the media.

I. WHO WON AND WHO LOST POLITICALLY

To sum up, these three points are what parties signed up to politically on 10 April 1998:

First British sovereignty over Northern Ireland remains intact

Second, historical adversaries in Northern Ireland agree to share power in a local Assembly

Third six cross border bodies between north and south of the island are set up to recognise the ‘Irish dimension’[i].

The first and most important question is who won and who lost here ?

The first time the IRA entered into negotiations with the British government during the 1968-1998 conflict was on 7 July 1972, when an IRA delegation -including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness who later participated in the negotiations leading to the 1998 Agreement- was flown over to London to discuss with the British government. The three central political demands of Irish Republicans-Sinn Fein and the IRA-were :

First a British declaration of intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland within five years.

Second an all-Ireland constituent Assembly to democratically determine the future of the island.

Third the release of all persons imprisoned as a result of the conflict[ii].

But the British state’s alternative to the political demands of Irish republicanism in 1972/1973 were already the following three points:

First British sovereignty over Northern Ireland remains intact

Second, historical adversaries in Northern Ireland agree to share power in a local Assembly

Third six cross border bodies between north and south of the island are set up to recognise the ‘Irish dimension’[iii].

Based on that it is clear that the conflict has been settled on what were the British government’s terms and that Sinn Fein now accepts Read the rest of this entry →

Along with About (and, of course, Home Pages), below are the actual articles that have had over 1,000 hits:

The burning of the British embassy – 40 years on
Women’s rights and the national struggle, 1916-1922
Politics and the rise of historical revisionism
Saor Eire – Marxist and republican
The New IRA and socialist-republicanism in the twenty-first century
Nationalisms and anti-nationalisms in Irish historiography
A history of the Provisional Republican Movement – part one of three
The Easter Rising and the ‘blood sacrifice’

In the 1960s there were militant grassroots campaigns for access to housing, both north and south. In Derry and elsewhere in the six counties they campaigned for equal access to housing and fought sectarian discrimination; they demonstrated and they occupied. In Dublin they also demonstrated and occupied, demanding that more houses be built and that empty houses be provided to people who needed them.

Today there are 90,000 people on housing waiting lists in the south, while there are 700 ghost estates – and that’s not counting the ghost estates that have been bulldozed – and many, many thousands of other unoccupied housing units. NAMA holds most of the abandoned properties and, while 4,000 of these have been earmarked for public housing, this isn’t exactly proceeding quickly. Moreover, 4,000 is a ridiculously low number – in Kildare alone, for instance, there are 5,000 people waiting for homes.

Indeed, reports by the BBC and The Guardian in April 2010 suggested there were as many as 300,000 fairly new, empty properties in the south. Karl Whitney notes, for instance, “A recent report by the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Planning estimated that there were over 300,000 empty, newly built properties in Ireland’ (The Guardian, April 8, 2010).

In the north, the situation is proportionately similar. The Department for Social Development itself noted in its official action plan released last year, “as of December 2012 there were over 40,000 people on the Waiting List with approximately half of these applicants in housing stress”. Not that Read the rest of this entry →

Veteran republican and working class fighter Christy Burke: more deserving than SF to hold 2016 mayoralty

I just heard that the Dublin mayoralty is be revolved among the five largest groups on the city council. Christy Burke will be mayor this year as representative of the Independents. In 2016 Sinn Fein will hold the mayoralty. As the largest party on the Dublin City Council, I guess it’s fair enough that the Shinners get to choose when their person is mayor, but it does stick in the craw to think these renegades from republicanism will hold the mayoralty on the 100th anniversary of the Rising. They bear much more relation to Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Fein of 1916 – which, of course, opposed the Rising – than they do to Connolly, Clarke, Pearse and their comrades.

On the other hand, Gerry’s united Ireland of 2016 will be not one step closer as a result of all the compromises made by him and his cabal. Them holding the mayoralty of Dublin in 2016 – and I guess they’ll have the mayoralty of Belfast at the same time – is, in my view, likely to be the highpoint of New Sinn Fein (or should that be Old Sinn Fein, given they’ve reverted to Griffithism). After that, where do they go?

There has been very little new stuff going up in recent weeks. This is because I have been absolutely swamped at work. This situation is likely to continue for about another two weeks, then I’m hoping to be able to get new stuff up again.